, across vast
distances of space imagination refused to span. Strange to think that
the shabby little man at my side had them all fast locked, pictures
upon pictures, in his brain, and as we were talking was back again in
goodness knows what remote latitude.

I kept looking at him and saying, "Twenty-two thousand miles of sea!
sixty-seven! and builds his own cottage!"

In addition to all this he had found time to be twenty-one years a
policeman, and to beget and rear successfully twelve children. He was
now, I gathered, living partly on his pension, and spoke of this
daughter married, this daughter in service here, and that daughter in
service there, one son settled in London and another in the States,
with something of a patriarchal pride, with the independent air too of
a man who could honestly say to himself that, with few advantages from
fortune, having had, so to say, to work his passage, every foot and
hour of it, across those twenty-two thousand miles and those
sixty-seven years, he had made a thoroughly creditable job of his life.

As we walked along I caught glimpses in his vivid and ever-varying talk
of the qualities that had made his success possible. They are always
the same qualities!

A little pile of half-hewn stones, the remains of a ruined wall,
scattered by the roadside caught his eye.

"I've seen the time when I wouldn't have left them stones lying out
there," he said, and presently, "Why, God bless you, I've made my own
boots before to-day. Give me the tops and I'll soon rig up a pair
still."

And with all his success, and his evident satisfaction with his lot,
the man was neither a prig nor a teetotaller. He had probably seen too
much of the world to be either. Yet he had, he said, been too busy all
his life to spend much time in public-houses, as we drank a pint of ale
together in the inn which stood at the end of the common.

"No, it's all well enough in its way, but it swallows time," he
remarked. "You see, my wife and I have our own pin at home, and when
I'm a bit tired, I just draw a glass for myself, and smoke a pipe, and
there's no time wasted coming and going, and drinking first with this
and then with the other."

A little way past the inn we came upon a notice-board whereon the lord
of the manor warned all wayfarers against trespassing on the common by
making encampments, lighting fires or cutting firewood thereon, and to
this fortunate circumstance I owe the most interestin